


Entanglement

by atamascolily



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Bad Pick-Up Lines, Drunken Shenanigans, F/M, First Meetings, Humor, Nerdiness, Quantum Mechanics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27085255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atamascolily/pseuds/atamascolily
Summary: Ghent's drunken rambling about quantum computing finds an appreciative audience.
Relationships: Zakarisz Ghent/Original Female Character
Comments: 7
Kudos: 5
Collections: Star Wars Rare Pairs 2020





	Entanglement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [virusq](https://archiveofourown.org/users/virusq/gifts).



By long-standing tradition, the crew of the _Wild Karrde_ celebrated a successful trading run on Berchest with a late-night foray in one of the dozens of cantinas lining the streets of the Spacers District in Calius until local dawn. Also per tradition, Ghent tucked himself away in the sagging booth in the back, away from the light and noise of the main floor, giving increasingly slurred lectures to any wandering passers-by, who ignored him in favor of less academic forms of revelry. After three shots of Corellian whiskey, he was too drunk to take their rejections personally.

This time, however, his audience took the form of a young human woman in spacer's leathers, with thousands of tightly woven dark braids two shades lighter than her skin. She couldn't take her eyes off him. Or, rather, the spiceshaker in his hand.

"So 'm gonna split a photon, and send it in here, right?" Ghent said, as he mimed firing a blaster with his free hand at the spiceshaker. "Pew pew! Pew pew! And it comes out as _two_ photons, who are movin' in dif'rrent directions, but, like... twins, okay? They know what each other's thinkin', and they mirror each other... so whatever you do to one happens to the other."

"Sounds kinky," the woman said, taking a sip of her drink.

"I know, right? But they're _entangled_ , see, so that's just how it is. So I send one photon over to you"--he rolled one of the credit chips enlisted as stand-in for the imaginary particle across the table at her--"and keep the other for myself. As long as I can get it to you without losing the entanglement, 'sall good."

"How do you manage that?"

Ghent was delighted by the question. " _Lasers_ ," he declared with pride and more imaginary blaster fire. "Send a bolt through a cloud of atoms with the information about the part'cle and they'll _all_ fall in sync long enough for you to get your photon intact. We hit 'em with _knowledge_. Amazing, right?"

The woman stared at him levelly, but didn't comment. This was usually the point where he lost people, assuming they made it this far in the first place. Ghent squeezed his eyes shut and did his best to regain focus.

"But t' send a message, I gotta get a _third_ photon and run it through a polarizer--you know, like your glasses," he said, gesturing to the sun goggles slung over her shoulder, half-buried beneath her crimson scarf. "Give't a _position_ \--one or nothin', just like a regular databit. I call it a quantum bit--qubit for short. _Qubit_. Just like the old measurement of distance. Get it?" he guffawed, slapping the table at his own joke.

She didn't laugh. Either his sense of humor didn't translate as well as he'd hoped, or they didn't have cubits on Berchest. But she hadn't changed the subject or stalked off in disgust, so he assumed she was still with him, at least for the moment.

"So how do we get to a perfectly encrypted, completely unsliceable message like you claimed?" she asked. "I thought that was the whole point of this exercise, not mutilating bits of light for the fun of it."

"'M getting to that," Ghent slurred. He took another sip of his cocktail to steady himself. "String up enough qubits and you've got--a message, right? So I've got to entangle my message with my photon, so that _they_ fall in sync with each other, right? So I shoot 'em _all_ up. Boom, boom, boom. Instant sync. Which means that _your_ photon is gonna get the info along with it, 'cause it's linked to my original particle. An' the best part is, it's all _instantaneous,_ " he crowed, proud of himself for managing such a big word on the first try.

"Oh."

Ghent was far from an expert on human behavior--he was, according to Dankin, the _last_ person one should ask for advice on social matters--but even he knew that word could mean all kinds of different things, depending on context. Sometimes it was a polite dismissal. Sometimes it meant the speaker couldn't think of anything else to say.

This "oh" sounded like she _got it_.

"Ta-da! No need for an encrypt!" Ghent finished with what he hoped was an appropriately dramatic flourish with the spiceshaker. He overshot the angle and a was surrounded by a cloud of finely-ground ochre dust. He sneezed violently as he inhaled, ruining the moment.

"You--you get what I mean," he said weakly, when he'd recovered himself.

"Yeah," the woman said slowly. "Yeah, I do. And I want to see it in action."

Ghent's shoulder's slumped. He probably should have expected this. "'Sall theoretical," he confessed. "I haven't been able to build a prototype yet--"

It wasn't for the lack of trying. It was just... harder than he'd expected to construct a working model in his tiny quarters in between jobs. Especially not after the last explosion had alerted the rest of the _Wild Karrde_ 's crew to his plans. They couldn't outright ban him from tinkering--he could override all of the restrictions they slapped on him without breaking a sweat, and they all knew it--but it made both future experimentation and social interactions even more awkward than usual.

"I think I can fix that," the woman said. She still hadn't taken her eyes off him. "I'm a mechanic by trade. Most of my business is in droid repair, but I do a little bit of custom computing construct on the side. Enough that I probably have most of the parts you need on hand. And if we could get something like what you're describing to work, and _prove_ it--"

"That'd be awesome!"

She threw back her head and laughed--with him, not _at_ him, Ghent was certain. He'd learned the hard way there was a difference.

"I like you. I like you _a lot_ ," she said and offered him a hand. Ghent accepted it gingerly, as if it were a trip wire that might explode in his face at any moment. "Amalie Dart."

Oh. That was her name. They were doing introductions now. Okay, he got it now. "Zakarisz Ghent. Pleased to meet you."

"Me, too." Amalie scanned his face speculatively. She still hadn't let go of his hand. "Say, you wanna come over to my place, and, uh, entangle ourselves in the possibilities?"

"For science?" It was important to be absolutely sure of these things from the start; Ghent didn't want any disastrous confusions later on.

Amalie grinned. "Yeah. _For science_. Right."

"Well..." Ghent hesitated for a fraction of a second, looking back up towards the front of the bar where Aves and Dankin were playing sabacc, trying to catch his crewmates' eyes.

Aves looked up long enough to register Ghent's obvious fluster and the aforementioned hand-holding and shot him a thumb's up in the universal gesture that meant _Go for it, bro_.

Unable to believe his luck, Ghent took a deep breath, and let Amalie lead him out the back entrance to her place.

Entanglement turned out to be way more fun than Ghent had ever believed possible. Having the right partner made all the difference--even if, strictly speaking, they didn't get to the quantum parts right away. Maybe next time? The _Wild Karrde_ did make frequent runs to Berchest, after all--

Ghent was going to have to put up with so much teasing from the rest of the crew, but it was gonna be _so_ worth it.

For science, of course.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been flirting with the idea of "Ghent invents quantum computing for the lulz" ever since it showed up as a minor background plot detail in a fic I was writing, so I'm so delighted to have an excuse to use it here. 
> 
> For more about the extreme weirdness that is quantum computing, I recommend "The Quest for a Quantum Internet," by Dan Hurley in _Scientific American_ , which was one of my references for this piece. Any errors in the science are, of course, my own.


End file.
